Quotes About Humanity

Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.

And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself. The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.

I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs.

Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflected the landscape. And yet ... and yet ... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from — hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in . He was fascinated.

Just because it's not nice doesn't mean it's not miraculous.

Imagination, not intelligence, made us human.

Mere animals couldn't possibly manage to act like this. You need to be a human being to be really stupid.

Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally evil, but by people being fundamentally people.

There is no doubt that being human is incredibly difficult and cannot be mastered in one lifetime.

Humanity's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.

If you don't know when to be a human being, you don't know when to be a witch.

They called themselves the Munrungs. It meant The People, or The True Human Beings. It's what most people call themselves, to begin with. And then one day the tribe meets some other People or, if it's not been a good day, The Enemy. If only they'd think up a name like Some More True Human Beings, it'd save a lot of trouble later on

Where's the pleasure in bein' the winner if the loser ain't alive to know they've lost?

Seeing things a human shouldn't have to see makes us human.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage.

But what's worth more than gold? Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren't you worth more than that?

People needed to believe in gods, if only because it was so hard to believe in people.